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Anonymous Coward writes:

A Canadian company, Thoth Technology Inc, has been awarded a patent for an inflatable space elevator.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/space-elevator-could-lift-people-12-miles-up-in-the-air/

A Canadian space company was recently awarded a patent for a space elevator that would reach about 12 miles (20 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

...

According to Thoth Technology Inc., the company that was awarded the patent, the U.S. patent allows for an elevator that would be 30 percent cheaper than the fuel required by a conventional rocket. Also, the system would be fully reusable, further reducing costs, the company said.

"Astronauts would ascend to 20 km by electrical elevator," inventor Brendan Quine said in a statement. "From the top of the tower, space planes will launch in a single stage to orbit, returning to the top of the tower for refueling and reflight."

martyb writes:

We have previously run stories about 2 TB, 4 TB, and 6 TB Solid State Drives (SSDs) and their seemingly inevitable but gradual increase in capacity over time. Samsung just announced a HUGE increase in drive capacity, leap-frogging all other storage devices out there — including spinning hard disk storage [takyon: a 6 TB 2.5" drive already leapfrogs spinning disk]!

Ars Technica is reporting that Samsung unveils 2.5-inch 16TB SSD: The world's largest hard drive. The third-generation 3D V-NAND is now up to 48 TLC layers and 256Gbit per die. From the article:

At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears to be the world's largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters. The rather boringly named PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16 terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package. By comparison, the largest conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 or 10TB.

The secret sauce behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the company's new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die; twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were commercialised by various chip makers last year. To reach such an astonishing density, Samsung has managed to cram 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND into a single die. This is up from 24 layers in 2013, and then 36 layers in 2014.

Though claimed capacity is 16 TB, actual available storage is 15.36 TB (providing 640 GB of over provisioning.) The drive is 15mm high so it is geared to the enterprise market; it probably won't fit in your laptop where 9.5mm is an unofficial standard.

In case you were wondering, by some estimates this capacity is enough to store 1.5 copies of the uncompressed textual data in the print collection of the US Library of Congress (LoC).

It boggles my mind to consider such large storage capacities. Given the global population is about 8.3 billion, just one of these drives would be sufficient to store 1.8 KiB on every human being on the planet, never mind an entire rack of these drives.

What practical use is there for such capacities? What would you do with one (or more) of these? How would this fit into your "Big Data" application?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The White House announced a new Heroin Response Strategy on Monday to combat a "heroin/opioid epidemic" across 15 states in the northeast:

The Office of National Drug Control Policy said it would spend $2.5 million to hire public safety and public health coordinators in five areas in an attempt to focus on the treatment, rather than the punishment, of addicts. The funding — a sliver of the $25.1 billion that the government spends every year to combat drug use — will help create a new "heroin response strategy" aimed at confronting the increase in use of the drug. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that heroin-related deaths had nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013.

[...] Once thought of as a drug used only by hard-core addicts, heroin has infiltrated many communities, largely because of its easy availability and its low price, officials said. The problem has become especially severe in New England, where officials have called for a renewed effort to confront it. Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont devoted his entire State of the State Message in January to what he called "a full-blown heroin crisis" in his state. Like the new White House effort, the governor called for a new, treatment-based approach to the drug.

[More after the break...]

AnonTechie writes:

The U.S. Commerce Department on Monday delayed for at least a year its plans to give up oversight of a key component of Internet governance.

The department said it would renew its contract with the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers for one year. ICANN administers the Internet's domain-name system, through contracts with the companies that sell website names and addresses. Commerce has overseen ICANN since the organization was created in 1998. Last year, the Obama administration said it planned to transfer ICANN oversight to an unspecified group of international stakeholders by September 2015.

Critics of the plan have expressed concerns that it may open the door to influence by foreign governments that aren't committed to Western principles of free expression, and may want to impose different rules for administering the Internet in different parts of the world.

Original is available at iBloomBerg.

[Also Covered By]: U.S. Transfer of Internet Oversight Is Delayed

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

ScienceDaily summarizes a new study (paywalled) published a few days ago in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

It is the first study to find a link between autistic traits and the creative thinking processes.

People with high levels of autistic traits are more likely to produce unusually creative ideas, new research confirms. While they found that people with high autistic traits produced fewer responses when generating alternative solutions to a problem - known as 'divergent thinking' - the responses they did produce were more original and creative.

The research...looked at people who may not have a diagnosis of autism but who have high levels of behaviours and thought processes typically associated with the condition. This builds on previous research suggesting there may be advantages to having some traits associated with autism without necessarily meeting criteria for diagnosis.

People with high autistic traits...are typically considered to be more rigid in their thinking, so the fact that the ideas they have are more unusual or rare is surprising. This difference may have positive implications for creative problem solving.

They might not run through things in the same way as someone without these traits would to get the typical ideas, but go directly to less common ones. In other words, the associative or memory-based route to being able to think of different ideas is impaired, whereas the specific ability to produce unusual responses is relatively unimpaired or superior.

IBM Introduces Two Open-Source-Only Mainframes

patella.whack and an Anonymous Coward both wrote in about IBMs new Linux only Mainframes.

IBM is introducing two mainframe servers that run only on the open-source Linux operating system.

The new hardware will make it easier to run technology like the MongoDB database and the open-source software Spark. Presently more than a third of IBM's mainframe clients are running the Linux operating system. IBM also said it will release mainframe code to the public and join a new cohort of less than a dozen academic, government and corporate entities in what's called the Open Mainframe Project, an open source endeavor devoted to helping companies using mainframe computers.

IBM is sweetening the pot by contributing 250,000 lines of mainframe code to the Linux community, hoping to attract a new generation of developers to their platform. To help coax new users, IBM will be offering free access to the LinuxOne cloud, a mainframe simulation tool it developed for creating, testing and piloting Linux mainframe applications.

Some of the specs for the machines can be found in this article from Reuters, including a partnership with Canonical Ltd. to distribute Ubuntu on the LinuxONE and zSeries systems.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The BBC reports on a woman who was sent pictures of a penis via Apple AirDrop.

The victim received two pictures of an unknown man's penis on her phone via Apple's Airdrop sharing function.

Lorraine Crighton-Smith, 34, said she felt "violated" and reported it to the British Transport Police (BTP).

Supt Gill Murray said this particular crime was new to her force and urged people to report any other incidents.

Ms Crighton-Smith, who was travelling on a train in south London, told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme: "I had Airdrop switched on because I had been using it previously to send photos to another iPhone user - and a picture appeared on the screen of a man's penis, which I was quite shocked by.

The article later describes how to make sure that AirDrop is set to only allow pictured from known contacts.

Is this a major privacy issue or is it simply a case of a misconfigured device?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Founder of Wikipedia Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales is now the Committee Chairman for Lawrence Lessig's campaign to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States:

"Larry's run for President is different," said Wales, who founded the free-access, free-content encyclopedia in the early 2000s. "He's crowdfunding his campaign instead of seeking out rich donors. He's showing people that we can change the rigged political system."

Both long-time supporters of Internet freedom, Wales and Lessig have stood side by side on previous issues, most notably in opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012. Wales' day-long Wikipedia blackout protesting SOPA influenced other major Internet players to follow suit and is credited with helping to sink the legislation.

"I'm deeply grateful for Jimmy's support," said Lessig. "We both believe in the power of the people to push back against special interests. He's a valuable player in this fight to end the corrupting role of money in politics once and for all."

"The Internet community came together to fight back against SOPA and we were successful." Wales said. "Now we're behind Lessig to fight for citizen equality. When you light up the Internet, anything is possible."

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

Using a specially designed computational tool as a lure, scientists have netted the genomic sequences of almost 12,500 previously uncharacterized viruses from public databases.

ScienceDaily reports on an recently accepted manuscript in eLife:

Finding a treasure trove of new virus genome sequences has opened the door to using those data to identify previously unknown microbial hosts, as well. These new possibilities are attributed to VirSorter, a computational tool [which] scoured public databases of sequenced microbial genomes.

"We can survey a lot of environments to find new viruses, but the challenge has been answering, who do they infect?...[W]e can explore that viral-host linkage. That's a really important part of the equation."

Though viruses are generally thought to take over whatever organism they invade, [we] identified a few viruses, called prophages, which coexist with their host microbes and even produce genes that help the host cells compete and survive.

"That is a really different and largely unexplored phenomenon. [It] appears quite widespread, and virtually nobody is studying these kinds of viruses."

Original Submission

BK writes:

According to The Guardian:

The unnamed woman, a resident of Petrer in Alicante, south-east Spain, posted the photo on her Facebook page with the comment "Park where you bloody well please and you won't even be fined".

The police tracked her down within 48 hours and fined her.

Apparently, this is allowed in Spain so that police can "avenge their dishonor".

This is exactly the sort of behavior that leads to public distrust of police.

FakeBeldin writes:

This story is a new take on online liberties in Spain:

Spanish story (more elaborate) here

I'd add a snarky comment here, but everything I came up with is just trolling.
Summing up my feelings: Spanish police: SRSLY, WTF?!

Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Toshiba has showed off a NAND flash device using through-silicon vias (TSVs) to stack 16 NAND dies, a technology it announced earlier this month. From Tom's Hardware:

TSV technology removed the wire bonding from the edges of the die. Instead, the signal is passed through the entire stack vertically. Vertical NAND, often referred to as V-NAND or 3D NAND, differs from TSV, though. Nothing leads us to believe that the two technologies can't work together, but at this time we are unaware of any designs that merge the two technologies.

[...] Toshiba's partners are excited about this product for two reasons: The first is performance. PMC Sierra makes very high-performing NVMe SSDs that move the bottleneck from the PCIe interface to the flash itself. The Princeton controller uses 32 channels to address a large number of flash die and is a very expensive controller to manufacture. If the company is able to reach the same performance level with just 16 channels, the overall cost will drop. The capacity can remain the same because TSV allows Toshiba to stack twice the number of die in each package.

Performance is only one aspect of the overall datacenter equation, though. The upfront costs are minimal compared to the long term costs due to power consumption. PMC Sierra demonstrated a very wide gap in power efficiency between non-TSV Toggle mode flash and new TSV Toggle mode flash.

The use of TSV could help scale NAND capacity in the vertical dimension even further.

Original Submission

mendax writes:

Opposition to the creation of autonomous robot weapons have been the subject of discussion here recently. The New York Times has added another voice to the chorus with this article:

The specter of autonomous weapons may evoke images of killer robots, but most applications are likely to be decidedly more pedestrian. Indeed, while there are certainly risks involved, the potential benefits of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — to soldiers, civilians and global stability — are also significant.

The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn't stand up under scrutiny. However high-tech those systems are in design, in their application they are "dumb" — and, particularly in the case of chemical and biological weapons, impossible to control once deployed.

A.I.-based weapons, in contrast, offer the possibility of selectively sparing the lives of noncombatants, limiting their use to precise geographical boundaries or times, or ceasing operation upon command (or the lack of a command to continue).

Personally, I dislike the idea of using AI in weapons to make targeting decisions. I would hate to have to argue with a smart bomb to try to convince it that it should not carry out what it thinks is is mission because of an error.

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

As reported in Wired a few hours ago:

Every release of Google's operating system so far has taken the name of a sweet treat. So while the next version of Android is officially known as release 6.0, you and I should just call it Marshmallow.

In a video, a couple of Googlers reveal the name and give some insight into the company's obsession with sugary naming conventions.

The new mobile OS will roll out to supported Android phones later this year (October or November, most likely). Also, it's important to note that this is version 6.0, not 5-point-something, so this will be a substantial update. If you're a developer, you can download the preview SDK, and start testing your apps. New features include direct sharing between Android devices, as well as system-level support for fingerprint sensors.

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

More than 200 academics have signed an open letter criticizing a controversial new statement [PDF] by the American Psychological Association suggesting a link between violent video games and increased aggression.

The APA writes:

It is the accumulation of risk factors that tends to lead to aggressive or violent behaviour. The research reviewed here demonstrates that violent video game use is one such risk factor.

A positive association between violent video game use and increased aggressive behavior was found in most (12 of 14 studies) but not all studies published after the earlier meta‐analyses. This continues to be a reliable finding and shows good multi‐method consistency across various representations of both violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior.

However, the group of academics said they felt the methodology of the research was deeply flawed as a significant part of material included in the study had not been subjected to peer review. "I fully acknowledge that exposure to repeated violence may have short-term effects - you would be a fool to deny that - but the long-term consequences of crime and actual violent behaviour, there is just no evidence linking violent video games with that," said one.

"If you play three hours of Call of Duty you might feel a little bit pumped, but you are not going to go out and mug someone."

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

The New York Times recently printed Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.

Some choice excerpts:

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another's ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are "unreasonably high." The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another's bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others.

The company's winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — "purposeful Darwinism," one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

Bo Olson...said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. "You walk out of a conference room and you'll see a grown man covering his face," he said. "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk."

[T]he Anytime Feedback Tool, [is] the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone's interest to outperform everyone else. Most comments, he said, are positive. However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly.

Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event.

There are many more statements in this vein, as well as several in defense of the company's priorities. Any Amazonian Soylentils want to chime in?

In a recent recruiting video, one young woman warns: "You either fit here or you don't. You love it or you don't. There is no middle ground."

Update: Following the NYT report, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos responded in a memo to employees.

Original Submission

Locust-Of-Control writes:

From the Canadian Developer Connection blog:

Intel has open-sourced the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit software used by Stephen Hawking. ACAT was "developed in C# using .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 at Intel Labs to allow people with disabilities to communicate with ease". ACAT is operated using a single switch, which in the case of Hawking is a facial signal (cheek movement) interacting with an infrared beam. While the ACAT system provides effective communication assistance, it can do a lot more; its powerful menu-based UI allows for control of the entire operating system.

[Editor's Note: The actual open sourcing of this was in December 2014, but the blog entry is from August 15, 2015.]

Original Submission